Free Seeds of Plenty by Jennifer Juo

Chinese, are poor. We used to be the richest, most powerful in the world when the English were still running around in animal skins.”
    Simeon and the villagers laughed at this comment.
    “But you know why we fell behind?” Winston continued. “Because we fell behind in technology. We invented gunpowder, only we didn’t know it. We used it in firecrackers. The English took it and made it into guns and shot us with it.”
    “Dat is crazy crazy,” Simeon said. “Dey steal your tricks, eh.”
    “You shouldn’t fall behind either. You can’t let the white man rule. You need to take his tricks and make yourselves strong too.”
    Winston didn’t know if his argument would have any effect on the chief or Simeon. But he was appealing to that side of Simeon that was in himself too. It wasn’t simply a desire to be like them, it was a competitive motivation to one up them, to be better than the white man. Just then, a black snake, the most widely feared and dangerous black mamba, slithered from a tree. The venom from a black mamba was usually fatal, resulting in immediate cardiac arrest. Simeon moved quickly, slicing its head off with his machete.
    ***
     
    That night, Winston and Richard drove to a hotel in the nearby shantytown several miles away from Simeon’s village. The hotel had peeling pink paint, dark green shutters, and West African highlife music blaring from the bar downstairs. It was dirty, noisy, and full of heavily made up girls standing around in hallways garishly lit by red and blue light bulbs. Winston, Richard, and their local guide sat down at the bar-restaurant for dinner. The menu was “whatever caught in the bush today.” Tonight it was snake meat.
    After dinner, Winston walked down the hallway of his hotel-brothel, and the girls followed him to his room, yelling “ O’Ebo , I give you pleasure! Please take me!” He threw some naira bills toward the girls and then pushed them out with his door. His room was poorly furnished—a cast-iron bed, a thin, bug-infested mattress, stained walls, gray cement floor, and a lone exposed light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Winston noticed a small window up high, covered with a screen full of holes. There was no glass. He took out a dark green mosquito coil and lit it on the floor. The sharp, incense-like smell of the burning coils suddenly brought back a feeling of his childhood.
    He recalled his mother the way all men remember their mothers—sweet-smelling, soft-spoken, warm. His mother was holding him in her arms. They were in his room, one of the many rooms on their estate. It was dark and windy outside. He could hear the tree limbs hitting the wall of his room. But when he tried to bring up his mother in his mind, he couldn’t remember her face exactly, only the idea of it.
    He staggered to the bed and sat down. He could hear the sound of sex and scurrying cockroaches. Suddenly, here in this dingy brothel room, he felt the isolation of his own life. Since the loss of his mother, he hadn’t been close to anyone. He had long suppressed the terrible events of her death and his guilt in the dark recesses of his memory.
    He recalled his mother’s body lying inert and cold in the corner of the broken building. He and his mother had been on the run. They were supposed to have met his father at the port in Shandong and to have sailed to safety in Taiwan. But they hadn’t fled fast enough. With Japanese troops everywhere and Communists not far behind, they hid in an abandoned farmhouse, its roof caved in by a bomb.
    He thought of the abandoned farmhouse with the broken tiled roof, a gaping hole in the ceiling, so that he could see the stars at night. They only had a few steamed buns and some cold tea. His mother rationed their food each day, but now he realized she had only given it to him. His mother didn’t drink or eat anything for several days. He woke one morning and found her body so still, lifeless like an inanimate object. As an eleven-year old